MEMORY, LOSS, AND THE FAMILY PHOTO

This essay was presented at the New/Old Image Exchange Symposium at Ohio University in February, 2019.

Here is a portrait of my family. It is of my grandmother Florence, my mother Marilyn, and two of my four sisters, Lisa and Jane. My father likely took the photo in 1967 during a respite between two year-long stints quarantined at a tuberculosis hospital.

The photo is both posed and candid, staged and informal. The colors are warm: mauve shirts and soft sweaters to burrow into; homemade dresses and curtains of floral patterns; Jane has a cotton quilted blanket, and Lisa a purse proudly strapped across her shoulders; plastic flowers in the corner, matching the muted blues and pinks of backsplash tiles; a Formica table, knickknacks above the cupboards, a wall calendar from the local church, and a lone cooking pot. I am certain there is the smell of food here, of fried bacon and eggs and baked bread; a smell that lingers throughout each day until the next meal.

The photo contains three generations of women. My grandmother looks wary, confident, comfortable, tolerant. But she is also apart, the only one sitting as Lisa and Jane cluster around my mother. Her cat-eye glasses reflect the light from the back door and shadow her eyes. A headband exposes a widow’s peak even as it keeps hair out of the way while working hour after hour in that same room.

My mother’s expression is composed, possibly strained. Pursed lips, looking slightly to the side, strength and fatigue gleaned in her stoic expression. Somehow, I can’t help but think this look is directed toward my father behind the camera; she is impatient for the photo to be taken. And perhaps there is something more underneath: I read in her eyes the everyday tensions of marriage, of his illness, of gendered work, of care labor; eyes revealing weariness in that exasperated way that parents (especially mothers) know all too well. Lisa’s expression, in contrast, is innocently open and a little bemused; she is happy to be there, excited to participate.

Jane is elsewhere. She is looking out the back door, toward the daylight. She is probably four here, hair mussed, blanket in hand. She is the only one to not look at the camera or my father, her eyes wandering up and out, given to the distractions of somewhere else, of another place.

I can’t help but read into this gesture, which was likely a brief unplanned distraction, a wandering attention typical of a child. (In fact, I have another photograph, taken moments after, that contradicts my speculative reading of the image: Jane is engaged and smiling and showing off her missing front teeth.) And yet, when I look at this photograph, I am desperately scanning it over and over, searching for nascent clues and remnants, hints that might tell me why or how Jane would later develop early frontotemporal dementia in her forties, how a mind could erase itself, erase language and memory as she slowly transformed, moving from consciousness and the physical world to something and someplace else entirely.

The first thing to go for Jane was language. Words and sentences became scrambled, reduced to maddening phrases caught in repeated eddies of childhood memories, her work as a nutritionist, and pop-phrases and religious symbolism. Once, while holding a prayer book, running her finger along the text as if reading, she kept repeating to me:

Sugar, milk, and diabetes
Apostle’s Creed
The Drew Carey Show
I think so

Even this eventually ended, reduced to a quiet piercing stare; and finally, a delicate, frail, silent fist bump. She was young and strong. Her body was fine. She only forgot to talk, to remember, to eat. Watching this process made me feel helpless, confused, sad, and upset.

If memory and presence are so easily wiped away, I angrily thought at the time, why do I even bother with photographs and recordings? What is the point? And furthermore, aren’t unknowing and silence supposedly the ideals of contemplatives and mystics? To live in the present moment? The eternal now? To move into a cloud of unknowing? No, I concluded, these ideals are untenable if you cannot hold the past and future as well. Otherwise, you forget why and how to drink or talk or remember.

When I was a student in London, I stayed with my friend’s Aunt Beatrice and Uncle Ralph. Ralph had Alzheimer's, and Beatrice said to me, “I used to think that as we got older our bodies might fail us but at least we could still share our conversations and memories. Now, even that is not possible, and all we can do is be in the presence of one another.” This wisdom from Beatrice was true for Jane, too, but now that Jane is gone, everything has changed once again, and the photograph here becomes a weak, insufficient, desperate, and aching stand-in for her absence, steeped in memory.

How is it possible to not even be born during the taking of a photo or the making of a recording, yet now it is a physical object that has its own power to deeply affect me with memory? This is what another Jane—Jane Bennet—calls “vibrant materiality,” where things have their own “vitality…not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forced with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.” Or, in older, more archaic language: the photo becomes a talisman, an icon, a relic. In this photo, memory spins out from the past to meet me today: memory obscured, blurred, false, approximate, and nevertheless concrete and real. Memory becomes a wish for presence in the face of absence. This photo of my family is an absurd and rebellious cry into the silence—however fleeting, however foolish—against the systematic erasure of a brain.

All of these relationships—first, of shared lives and conversation; and when that is gone, simply being present with another; and when that goes, too, the fragile and temporary lattice of objects and ephemeral memory—are waves of thought and connection overlapping and receding, resurging and also destined to disappear.

Memory and this photograph are both weak proxies for the connections between people, but they also mean something important and profound. A photo such as this is an object I can grasp and carry and touch, and it touches me back. (Roland Barthes would say this touch goes further, that it “wounds” me. I agree.) This photo, when held in tension with the past and with memory, is something that can offer a faint thread, a finger straining to reach beyond its grasp, pointing to an absent, yet remembered presence. This photo: an archival stand-in, a place-marker for a gentle, delicate, frail, silent fist bump. A way to make something new out of something old.